In the April 2010 issue of Edge Magazine, at the bottom-right hand corner of a page about Alan Wake, there’s a little sidebar about this site. It’s been chosen as “Website of the Month,” and to my pleasant surprise the author sums up this site succinctly and accurately. It’s clear that whomever wrote that sidebar actually spent some time here, looked through the database, and noticed funny things about how I’ve structured the Quest (they even mention Dino Crisis–ha!). Anyway, if you live in an area where Edge is sold (and if this issue is still on the stands), check it out! The magazine was also nice enough to send me a copy of this issue when I couldn’t find it here in Japan.
Deadly Premonition is an Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma
My burning question about this game is, is it genius by accident or design? I can’t tell yet.
Heavy Rain
I finished Heavy Rain last week. Despite director David Cage’s insistence to the contrary, Heavy Rain isn’t really a horror game. It’s a thriller, or maybe mystery-suspense; if it were a film, it would live in an adjacent, but clearly separate section from the horror flicks. So, being a not-horror game, I’m not going to include it in the database here. It is, however, quite good, and like Quantic Dream’s earlier effort, Indigo Prophesy, readers of this site will probably find a lot to enjoy.
Heavy Rain is a pretty high-profile game, so I’m going to skip the paragraph where I tell you what the game is about and how it works. You already know that it’s a cinematic narrative that plays out from multiple perspectives and features a branching story line and a whole crapload of endings. And I’m sure that you’re aware that the control scheme is a mixture of Type C controls and Quick Timer Events. And the plot is about a guy trying to save his son from a serial killer called the Origami Killer. You know all this already, so consider this paragraph skipped.
I really enjoyed Heavy Rain, but I was also somewhat disappointed with it. It’s everything that I expected it to be, and yet, somehow, it felt a tad flat. I mean, the game itself really works: the art and graphics are phenomenal, the acting is good (I played in French with English subtitles, which was neat), the story is interesting, the branching gives the game decisions real weight, and the quick timer events actually work pretty well. There are some problems (some of the QTEs are pretty much impossible to pull off with a time limit, the movement controls lack a lot of precision, and the plot has some major gaping holes), but none of them really damage the experience. I think my problem with the game is that it represents such a huge effort to create an interactive story, and while it succeeds in so many ways, the actual story itself was somewhat predictable. It’s like the game graduated from all the pedestrian implementation flaws that drag other games down and ran instead into the much more complex problem of actually having competent plot.
I think that where Heavy Rain is most successful is in its use of camera work and character development to make game play decisions feel like they really matter. Knowing that if I mess up a branch I cannot go back, and also getting to know the characters enough that I want to play them in character had a huge impact on the value of the plot. This is also something that other genres have a really hard time with because they have to balance “story parts” with “game parts.” In Heavy Rain, it’s all the same mode.
So really, I have nothing too negative to say about this game. The few missteps are more than forgivable; this game design takes so much risk and pulls it off so well that a few misses here and there are hardly important. You should go run out and get this game right now.
Though the game itself is interesting, I also find it fascinating to see how other gamers respond to it. A lot of folks I know had a very negative response to the early part of the game, in which nothing particularly exciting happens. This section exists to define the main character and make his motivations for the later parts of the game seem plausible, and I personally had no problem with it at all, but some people I’ve spoken feel that any time spent playing a game in which exciting, extraordinary things are not happening is time wasted. They see the game as an action game waiting to happen, a constant tease that leads you on, promising to become a thrilling, button-mashing experience, and then just never does. “And when they get to the combat,” one friend laments, “it’s all goddamn QTEs!”
Me, I see this game as the ultimate evolution of the Adventure genre. Back when it was the Text Adventure genre, we had paragraphs of text to explain the situation, and then a passive blinking cursor to input commands. The major game play mode was exploration; look at this, examine that, try going over here. The genre graduated into the Graphic Adventure sometime in the late 1980s, and in those games there was still a lot of text, and still a lot of exploration, though mostly performed though point and click. We dropped the prefixes sometime in the ’90s, and Adventure games split into a couple of different groups (including a branch that eventually became Survival Horror), but the common traits have remained the same: heavy focus on plot and exploration of the environment. In Heavy Rain, plot is communicated via cinematography and spoken dialog. Exploration is still a major part of the experience, though the method involves hot spots littered throughout the environment and some QTEs. So to me, this is sort of a mid-90’s Adventure game with all the dials turned to 11 and cinematography and branching content sort of grafted on the top. And as Adventure games go, this one is one of the most action-packed I’ve ever played.
Part of the reason people are drawn to horror games, I think, is that they require some sort of narrative focus to effectively build tension. I think a lot of horror gamers, myself included, might be more interested in games with good, well-told stories than games that happen to feature ghosts and demons and flesh bag monsters. If you feel like you’re in that camp, give Heavy Rain a try.
The Inversely Suspicious Character Problem
I’m several hours into Heavy Rain now, and I’m throughly enjoying it. There are some flaws here and there but generally the whole thing is amazingly well done, and unlike 99% of other games on the market today. I’ll post a lot more about it when I finish.
Playing Heavy Rain got me thinking about the Inversely Suspicious Character Problem. I just made that phrase up; maybe there’s a formal way to describe this literary problem. The Inversely Suspicious Character Problem is an issue that plagues all types of mysteries, but is particularly damaging to whodunits. I define the problem as follows: Regardless of how dramatically suspicion is cast on a particular character, an astute reader will tend to suspect the most innocent character. Another way to say that is: mysteries authors that design their stories to surprise the reader by revealing the evil-doer at the very end must take steps to ensure that the criminal is beyond suspicion up until the last moment. If the reader already suspects a character and their suspicion turns out to be correct, the surprise is lost, so the author must work to mislead the reader. But a reader who is familiar with this sort of mystery avoids jumping to the obvious conclusion and instead simply looks for a character who seems to be entirely free of taint; this character is most probable to be the real criminal at the end. This doesn’t really take any brain power, and so it’s not as rewarding as deciphering the mystery given the clues that the author provides, and the result is that the surprise ending loses much of its punch.
Different authors deal with this problem in different ways. One way is simply to introduce so many characters that many end up being incidental, hopefully making inductive selection of the real culprit difficult. But even then, the author runs the risk of annoying the reader when a character who has absolutely no bearing on the story takes the blame. Criminals who turn out to be characters who were introduced early in the work and then quickly discarded (see: any given Scooby-Doo episode), or even worse, characters who enter the story only at the very end, are infuriating to readers because the clues that they’ve been mentally tracking over the course of the story turn out to be worthless.
Another approach is to avoid the problem entirely by revealing the criminal early in the drama and then making the story focus on the detective who figures it all out. Columbo works this way, and it’s quite satisfying. Other authors reveal the criminal but then provide the reader with a different problem, such as how the crime itself was committed (and indeed, in many locked-room murder mysteries the actual murderer is much less important than how they did it). In The Hound of the Baskervilles, as in many other Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle casts doubt over everybody by using an obviously unreliable narrator (Dr. Watson) and integrating the secret movements of the Holmes into the set of clues presented to the reader. This is genius because when it is revealed that Holmes has been working on the case in secret, many of the unresolved loose ends suddenly resolve themselves and the reader has a chance to make the mental leap to the real killer just as the story is about to reveal him itself, thus magnifying the surprise and satisfaction felt by the reader. Many Golden Age detective novels rely on a secondary character who jumps to all of the obvious conclusions before the reader has a chance to, thus focusing (sometimes deceivingly) the readers attention on a subset of clues. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot has Captain Hastings, Sherlock Holmes has Dr. Watson, and there are many others. Sometimes the side-kick is just there to give the detective a reason to talk about the case.
Whatever the method, mystery authors who seek to surprise the reader have to do something to conceal their criminal without lying to the reader or holding back clues. But this very act of attempted misdirection is a way for the reader to identify the real enemy; whomever the spotlight of suspicion shines on the least is quite likely to be guilty. So there needs to be some extra step, some other sort of twist, to keep the story relevant.
My one complaint with Heavy Rain is that I’ve deciphered the killer after only a few hours of play. I had a pretty good idea who to suspect even before all of the principal characters had been introduced. You can see the game going out of its way to cast suspicion in certain directions, but I’m pretty confident that in doing so its creators have instead highlighted the real criminal. It’s not that the story or characters are poor, it’s just that this is a form with which I’m familiar and the regular tropes are all accounted for. Now, I could be wrong, or the game could get real tricky and feature multiple endings with different characters named as the antagonist, but probably the end will reveal the character whom I’ve suspected since the second hour of play. There are quite a few other loose ends to tie up that I have no idea about, so I’m hoping the end isn’t completely predictable, but now that I’ve fixed the killer in my mind there’s much less brain power needed to play the game. Hopefully I’m wrong, and the Inversely Suspicious Character will turn out to be just another red herring.
Final note: DON’T YOU DARE discuss the real killer in Heavy Rain in the comments. Not even with spoiler tags. As confident as I am in my selection, having the game spoiled for me would ruin all of the anticipation of finding out if my theory is right.
Silent Hill Homecoming Review
I finally finished Silent Hill Homecoming this evening and posted a review. It’s not a bad game, and it’s more like classic Silent Hill than anything released since 2003, but a few key derivations from the formula damaged the experience for me. Still, it’s a positive sign that the series is moving forward (evidenced more dramatically, I suppose, by Silent Hill: Shattered Memories).
Japan Wasn’t Funny To Begin With
Japan: Not this
Tim, man, how’s it going?
We’ve never met, actually, but we both live in Tokyo and we both write about video games and we both have a lot of game industry experience. I’ve been following your work for a couple of years, back when it was all on insertcredit.com. Dreaming in an Empty Room is one of my favorite examples of honest-to-goodness real, insightful, video game journalism.
So, as one white guy in Japan to another, we’re cool. You’re not the type of guy who avoids the natives at all costs. I can tell you’re not the particular type of foreigner to arrives in Japan looking for a girlfriend and a job teaching English and leaves a year later with the comfortable sense that Japanese people are all crazy and your home country is infinitely more enlightened. You don’t spend your nights at The Hub and you don’t hijack every conversation with comments about how hot the girls are or how stupid the guys are. You speak Japanese; in fact, you put significant effort into learning the language. In short, you’re a foreigner in Japan with an open mind, somebody who’s here to learn, somebody who has a sense of respect for the locals even when their behavior doesn’t make sense. You are, therefore, part of the minority group of foreigners that I refer to as “not assholes.” We’ve never met, but I can tell. So, we’re cool.
But Tim, man, I gotta talk to you about your article about Japan. Not the article itself; I’m mostly in agreement with your complaints. Smoking really bothers me, I’ve sworn never to work for a Japanese company, I don’t drink alcohol, and the TV is pretty bad (although, if I had to choose, I would have personally taken the people-eating-food shows to task before comedy). No, the problem here is your very thesis:
“I haven’t changed. Japan hasn’t really changed, either. Something else, however, has.”
Dude. You’ve changed. Let me restate this thesis for you in a way that, I think, sums up your problem more succinctly than your 15,979 words.
“I’ve slowly come to the realization that my initial understanding of Japan, my corpus of knowledge about the country that brought me here originally, is woefully incomplete and, in some cases, idealistic and naive. And the more I learn about the Japan, the more mundane and flawed it appears. What originally looked like a theme park has proven to be just another country, with all the warts and problems that every country and culture has. I ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge and now Eden looks a whole lot more like a highly landscaped pile of moss.”
It’s cool man, everybody goes through this stage. That’s right, it’s a stage. Some people hit it earlier, some later, but eventually everybody who spends significant time in Japan passes through it. The good news is, it’s the second to last stage. The earlier stages, which consist of wide-eyed awe, then short-lived self confidence, then utter confusion, and finally anger, are all behind you. Now you’re in reconciliation, which is a rough point to be, but like I said, it’s second to last. The next step, which is the last step, is acceptance.
Japan is a culture with a lot of history, but just like any culture in the world it has positive and negative aspects to it. If you choose to live here, you get positive and negative input in equal doses, just like in any other culture in the world. If
I can just throw this out there with no context and we’re cool, right? Nerd cred represent.
I don’t mean to get all zen on you here man, but reconciliation is about changing from within. You can either adjust your perspective or you can leave (or, option three, stay and be miserable and complain all the time and move out of the “not asshole” group). Adjusting your perspective doesn’t mean you have to like all the things that bug you about Japan, it just means that you accept some of those things as normal operating behavior and not some aberration of common sense.
My suggestion, dude, is to separate your complaints into two categories: stuff that bugs you because it makes no sense, and stuff that bugs you because it makes it hard for you to live your life the way you want to. The latter category is probably things like “it’s hard to be a vegetarian here,” or “working late every night for no reason is a horrible way to live,” or “I cannot afford to live here.” These issues could be deal-breakers, and if you can’t satisfy them somehow, you should probably consider moving to a different country. The former category, however, doesn’t really have all that much to do with you; businessmen screaming drunkenly at night is weird, but only because your definition of “normal” doesn’t include it (and, I imagine that many of the locals would agree with you on this point). Common sense is not, in any way, shape or form, common. Letting that former category go and realizing that It’s Ok Even If I Wouldn’t Do It That Way is the first step to the acceptance stage.
That’s not to say that anything goes, or that you have to like everything you see. Au contraire, when you reach acceptance it’s easier to separate the real problems with the society from the flamboyant-but-non-representative actions of vocal minorities.
Personally, I live in Japan because it requires me to learn constantly. The volume of information that I do not understand about the language, the culture, the history, and the people is infinitely vast. There’s lots of stuff I don’t like about Japan, but I live here because it requires me to keep thinking, to keep learning. There was a time when I didn’t know why I wanted to live in Japan, and another time when I thought I wanted to live in Japan for the wrong reasons. So I know how this feels, man. When I leave, it’ll either be because a better opportunity comes along or because one of those lifestyle deal-breakers rears its ugly head.
So Tim, dude, I gotta wrap this up before it turns into my own little novella, but please, take this to heart: it’s you who is changing, and the change isn’t random. It’s a natural progression and it’s the direct result from living and learning about a foreign culture. Love it or leave it, but don’t blame the locals for odd behavior that doesn’t conform to your internal correctness barometer. If you’re going to take Japan to task about something, make it a real issue, like the treatment of women in the workplace or the status of Japanese people with Korean heritage. Figure this out and move on or drop out and find something less challenging to do with your life. Seriously, that’s the junction that you’re at right now.
Alright, I’m getting off my high horse now. London Hearts is on in 5. I’ve got some Deadly Premonition to catch up on, too.
Talk to you later,
Chris
PS: If you haven’t done it yet, try getting out of Tokyo for a while. Out of Kanto, I mean. In my limited experience, every other part of Japan is very different than Tokyo. People are jerks in Tokyo.
PPS: If you want to hang out some time and swap game industry war stories, drop me a line. I know a good tan-tan men place in Shibuya. Oh, right, you don’t eat meat. Do you eat fish? How do you survive here, man?
Off Topic: Replica Island Released
This has nothing to do with horror games, but since a few of you asked about it I thought I’d mention Replica Island. My day job involves working on Android, and for the past year I’ve been putting all of my free time into this little side-scroller starring the green Android robot. In fact, work on the game took so much of my free time that my regular posting schedule on this blog degraded (and I played fewer horror games last year than in the last five or six years). Now the game is complete and I can go back to wasting my life away playing horror games!
If you’re interested, here’s a short video I made of the game. There’s more details (and source code) on replicaisland.net. If you have an Android phone, try it out and let me know what you think (it’s free!).
Another Year, another GDC
I’m visiting the US this week for GDC. It’s the first time I’ve attended in the last two years, but GDC never really changes. This year I actually gave a talk, which was fun, though I had so much work to do that I barely had time to visit any sessions. If you’ve written to me in the last, say, three or four weeks, I probably didn’t get back to you because I was crunching hard on getting my talk done. Sorry. I’ll write back, I promise.
I didn’t see anything horror-specific this year. I tried to go to both of Richard Rouse III’s talks, but both of them were closed due to popularity. I did have a chance to hang out with Richard for a bit, which was cool. I told him that he should watch this video about Deadly Premonition, which really does look like it’s in the running for greatest game ever made. I also bumped into Akira Yamaoka and Goichi Suda this morning, which was kinda neat. Yamaoka remembered me from the last time we spoke (what, 3 or 4 years ago, right after Silent Hill 4 came out). I told him I’m still waiting for him to do a talk on Earless Hoichi.
I’ll be back in Japan late next week. Silent Hill Homecoming, Heavy Rain, and, yes, Deadly Premonition await.
Silent Hill Homecoming is a Weird Game
I just put another solid four hours into Silent Hill Homecoming, and man, the game is weird. Not the story or the game content itself–that part is sort of run-of-the-mill Silent Hill fare. It’s the pacing that’s all weird. I only found one serum in the first six hours, for example, and this evening in the space of an hour I picked up four more. Characters are introduced and then quickly vanish, and are subsequently gone for hours at a time. I keep getting the feeling that I’m not playing the game the way that the designers intended (although, to be fair, the game is also sometimes gives misleading objectives). The placement of health items and ammo is also weird–I made it through two bosses with only one or two health drinks the entire time. It’s really annoying to limp around for hours at a time. Even the Otherworld transitions seem to be irregularly organized on the game’s timeline.
But it’s the save spot placement that throws me for a loop more than anything else. Four hours of play this evening and I only saved three times–and I didn’t once continue. That means each play session requires at least an hour to get to the next save spot, which is stupid! I suspect that the designers expected continues to compensate for distantly-placed saves, but in my case, I rarely have this much time to play. I have no beef with save spots but damn, they could be just a tad more frequent.
The result is that I am never sure how close I am to the wire. Maybe that’s the goal–to keep me off balance and guessing. It sort of sucks, though; I’m having trouble deciding how to ration my health and ammo because the narrative beats are so irregular.
Otherwise, the game is pretty good. This evening I made it through the Doctor Fitch section, which was absolutely phenomenal–the best Silent Hill descent / otherworld / boss sequence I’ve played since Silent Hill 2, I think (although Silent Hill 3 is a strong contender).
It’s just that, I played this fantastic section, beat the boss at the end of it, got deposited back in the town, B-lined for the next objective, and then… walked around for 30 minutes trying to find a save point. I fortunately found one before it was too late, but man, if I had been killed by some stray zombie dog (of which there seem to be an infinite supply), I would have lost close to two hours of play.
In for a penny, in for a pound. I’ll finish it, hopefully soon. But playing it is a trade-off, like a cool-looking jacket that has a label in the collar that occasionally scratches the hell out of your neck.
Silent Hill: Homecoming Impressions
So Silent Hill Homecoming sat on my shelf for a whole year and I never even took the plastic off. I wanted to–don’t get me wrong–I just had other games ahead of it in the pipe (and, frankly, my game-hours-per-month was down in the single digits for most of 2009). So after I finished Cursed Mountain a while back, I decided to make Homecoming my next game.
I’m several hours in now and so far it’s pretty good. The camera, which I identified back in 2007 as a potential problem, is indeed not very good. It’s not that the camera doesn’t work, it’s just that it’s a standard, 3rd person camera. All of the composition and framing that the previous Silent Hill games have done is lost on this Western 2-stick generic system. Other than that, things are pretty good. The Silent Hill vibe is well captured, the influence from the Silent Hill movie is clear and not nearly as annoying as I feared it would be. Pyramid Head looks good (though it remains to be seen if they’ll actually use him correctly or just make him a cool-looking boss), the combat system is pretty slick, and the levels are pretty well designed. I’m surprised that there have been so few Otherworld transitions so far; by this point in any other Silent Hill game, I would have gone into and out of the Otherworld several times, but as it is it’s only shown up once or twice (and even then for very short durations).
I will say that the game has a few issues above and beyond the camera. After playing for a while this evening, for example, I stopped being able to bring up the item menu. I can bring up the weapon menu, and if I try to transition from the weapon menu to the item menu, I can see the item menu appear for a brief second, but then it drops me back in the game (I even tried to switch the buttons around to confirm it’s not some problem with my controller). This is a problem because it means I can’t access health drinks, and that’s a problem because all of a sudden the difficulty of the game has spiked. I’ve gone for three or four hours without a single death, but at my current save I’ve died ten or fifteen times (the last two or three because of this bug with the item menu, admittedly).
This brings me to another problem: after fifteen deaths I realized that I’ve actually been carrying a gun around for most of the game. The gun icon appears at the bottom of the screen, far away from all the other weapons, and though I’ve probably had it since the first hour of game play, I never saw it there and never once used it (the game probably told me that I collected it, but after that I probably saved and promptly forgot it was there). I only found it because I tried hitting the d-pad in a desperate hope that the health drink command was mapped to some other button (no luck). The game hasn’t been very hard so far and I really haven’t needed the gun (I mean, Silent Hill is about lead pipes), but it sort of sucks that it’s been there the whole time and I didn’t even know it. I even dispatched a boss or two without ever realizing it was there.
So, my impression so far is that the game is pretty good. It knows the history of the Silent Hill series and has chosen a path that is sincere to that history without being a carbon copy (unlike some other games I could mention). I’m disappointed with the camera (especially for the indoor environments) but I like the combat system. The game’s been pretty easy up until this one difficulty spike, but the real problem is probably that the UI for the item and weapon screen is a) buggy and b) hard to read. The bugs will probably go away with a system restart, and now that I know to look more carefully at my item screen, I hope I won’t miss an important part of my inventory again.
If my impressions were a terrorist threat level, I’d be “guarded but optimistic.”